SENATORS URGE INVESTIGATION INTO PORT'S LEASE TO CHINA

Both of California's senators have asked the White House to investigate the leasing of a former Navy base in Long Beach to China's state-owned shipping company, which last year transported several thousand automatic weapons that federal officials say were headed for Los Angeles street gangs.

The senators, Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, both Democrats, asked President Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel Berger, whether he thought there were any security reasons not to lease China Ocean Shipping Co., or COSCO, the 145-acre site in the middle of Long Beach. The Port of Long Beach receives about one-fourth of the Chinese goods shipped to the United States.

The Chinese government signed a lease for the port last April, only three weeks after one of the company's ships, the Empress Phoenix, was raided by U.S. Customs Service officials acting on a tip that Chinese-made arms were being smuggled into the United States. The seizure of arms on the ship, which the Customs Service said were intended for street gangs, led in May to the arrest of officials of another state-run Chinese company, although COSCO has not been charged in the case.

An administration official said Wednesday evening that the White House was told by members of Congress last week that the lease merited investigation and that the issue had been referred to the Pentagon. But the official said, "We are not aware of any reason for concern."

Last year's arms shipment has figured indirectly in the investigations into Clinton's coffee meetings with large campaign donors and their friends. Shortly before the arrests in May, one of Clinton's Asian-American supporters escorted Wang Jun, the president of the Chinese company that apparently produced the weapons, Polytechnology, into one of the White House coffee meetings, where he met with the president.

Clinton apparently did not know about Wang's connections to Polytechnology or that the company was the subject of a major investigation in California into arms smuggling at the time he met Wang.